Contents

And now we come to my favorite part of this series, high-end Linux audio production. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: stable, efficient, and you don’t get gouged for software licenses. You have to be careful to select audio hardware that is well-supported on Linux, but this is less of a problem than it used to be. Look for USB audio interfaces that don’t need custom proprietary drivers, but stick to the USB spec like they’re supposed to. The hardy FFADO developers toil away developing and improving drivers for Firewire audio interfaces. No, Firewire is not dead, and you can easily add a Firewire card to almost any PC if it doesn’t already have one. I use FFADO for my cherished old Saffire Pro 26 I/O, and neither have let me down.

Believe it or not, there are antivirus programs targeted at desktop Linux users. If you have just switched to Linux and started looking for an antivirus solution, don’t bother – you do not need an antivirus program on Linux.

There are some situations when running an antivirus on Linux makes sense, but the average Linux desktop isn’t one of them. You would only want an antivirus program to scan for Windows malware.

Desktop

When Google began promoting its Chrome OS platform a couple of years ago, there was lots of criticism. For one thing, Google hadn’t quite ironed out some of the “cloud-only” issues that the operating system imposes on users, many of whom are used to using local applications. Since then, of course, Chromebooks running the operating system have improved dramatically, and are now available at $200 price points that challenge the laptop status quo (a $199 example from Acer is shown here).

Server

Earlier this month I wrote about SprezzOS, a new Linux distribution where its developers boasted it’s the most robust, beautiful, and performant Linux. Well, SprezzOS is now out in the while. The developers are now boasting they can install a Linux server in 120 seconds with their operating system.

For the most part, wired and wireless networks on the enterprise campus have been two separate entities controlled by different technologies. That’s about to change, thanks to a new suite of Unified Access technologies announced today by Cisco.

Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers at Red Hat hope to work on a handful of new systemd features as part of the Fedora 19 development cycle. One of the features includes work to make systemd have its own time-based job scheduler that’s similar in nature to cron.

Wilcox’s first kernel patch was submitted in 1997; he wanted to move some files from his Acorn Archimedes system to a Linux system and he couldn’t do it as the ISO format did not support the necessary extensions.

The patch was accepted, after a few comments that he deems to be “on target” and his career was more or less decided.

But things did not fall into place for a while; he was hired as a Java programmer by a bio-informatics start=-up after he graduated. Wilcox then got involved in porting Linux to the PA-RISC platform and he ended up getting hired by LinuxCare.

While the KVN infrastructure is built into the Linux OS, you need a modern version of the Linux kernel to use this virtual machine. KVM requires machine extensions. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux as of version 2.6.20. Even if your Linux distro has the stuff inside, your hardware configuration might not be cooperating. Intel VT or AMD-V support could be disabled by default.

Intel will be introducing their Haswell processors in the coming months. If using the Linux 3.8 kernel, GCC 4.7/4.8, Mesa 9.1, and other recent open-source Linux packages, you should be mostly set for experiencing the full benefits of the Ivy Bridge successor. However, there’s still a few pieces of Haswell’s Linux support still being worked out.

In terms of Chris Wilson’s benchmark results when comparing the threaded cairo-image, UXA with the Intel driver, and his experimental SNA acceleration architecture for the Intel driver, he concludes, “For the cases that are almost entirely GPU bound (for example the firefox-fishbowl, -fishtank, -paintball, -particles), we have virtually eliminated all the previous advantage that the GPU held. In a notable couple of cases, we have improved the image backend to outperform SNA, and for all cases now the threaded image backend beats UXA. However, as can be seen there is still plenty of room for improvement of the image backend, and we can’t let the hardware acceleration be merely equal to a software rasteriser…”

Graphics Stack

With all of the recent improvements going into Mesa/Gallium3D, along with some work advancements to the AMD GPU LLVM back-end, it’s slowly becoming a suitable time for enthusiasts wishing to experiment with OpenCL on the open-source Linux graphics stack through Gallium3D and the “Clover” state tracker.

OpenCL support in Gallium3D is still far from complete and not yet comparable to the proprietary OpenCL/GPGPU offerings bundled within the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. In reality, it will probably be at least another year before open-source OpenCL is in good shape for the Linux desktop. At this point, there’s just some simple OpenCL demos working for select graphics processors on Nouveau and Radeon.

SNA, Intel’s newest acceleration architecture for their open-source X.Org graphics driver, continues to receive improvements on a near daily basis.

Intel SNA is what most of the xf86-video-intel driver changes have been about since this 2D acceleration architecture was introduced back in 2011. SNA is the pet project of Chris Wilson at Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center and is the one responsible for a majority of the work.

Wayland 1.0.4 was released this week along with an adjoining update to its Weston reference compositor. Separately, a new patch-set has emerged for supporting per-output workspaces.

The Wayland/Weston 1.0.4 release was a bit behind schedule due to Kristian Høgsberg being ill, but the point releases are out now for those interested. The main 1.0.4 change is for Weston and it’s to address a “CPU eating bug” within the compositor’s plane code. There’s also been a few documentation fixes. With Wayland 1.0.4, destroy signal APIs were added and a more robust version of the event loop test case.

Mesa 9.1 should be released by the end of February as the latest version of this bi-annual open-source OpenGL implementation that continues to slowly but surely pickup new functionality for most major graphics drivers.

David Herrmann, the open-source developer that has made it a personal crusade to kill the Linux kernel console and to replace it with a user-space solution, has published the code to a new DRM kernel mode-setting driver. This new kernel driver is a generic VESA BIOS Extension DRM implementation like the vesafb VESA frame-buffer driver.

Benchmarks

As the next chapter after the Fedora 17 vs. Fedora 18 benchmarks for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, here are benchmarks comparing Fedora 18 to Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 13.04 on two separate PCs.

The performance between the latest Fedora and Ubuntu Linux releases aren’t incredibly surprising with many of the key components being the same (or similar) versions, but nevertheless I ran a bunch of benchmarks on a Core i7 3770K “Ivy Bridge” and Core i7 3960X “Sandy Bridge” Extreme Edition system with Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 13.04 using the 64-bit Linux releases. Benchmarks in full are on OpenBenchmarking.org.

After yesterday writing about recent benchmarking improvements, including over a dozen new open-source benchmarks graciously provided by Intel and then ongoing improvements to the Phoronix Test Suite client, there’s more to talk about this morning for those interested in open-source benchmarking.

Applications

Borrowing code or programs written by others is an accepted practice in the Free Software community. It is perfectly legal, being one of the core principles that defines Free Software. For open source or free software coders, it makes sense. Why write something from scratch when somebody else has already written it? Just take it and run, or take it and extend it.

One area I think that distro developers are overlooking with regards to reusing code concerns installation programs. Many distributions, especially those that are based on Ubuntu, have very easy-to-use, but plain-vanilla installers. Even the latest edition of Ubuntu’s installer is still not good enough (see Note to EFF: FDE implementation in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity is only at 50% and The state of manual LVM and full disk encryption configuration in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity).

The desktop computing landscape is rapidly changing all around us. Microsoft is now pushing Windows 8, the biggest change Microsoft has made to the desktop since Windows 95. This means that whether a Windows user chooses to switch to Mac OS X, Linux, or stick with Windows, he/she is in for a new learning experience. A transition to Linux may just be more familiar than making the jump to Window 8, and there are many open source alternatives to popular Windows applications. This large list of open source alternatives could make your transition to Linux easier than you thought possible.

Wine or Emulation

On Wednesday I wrote about the improvements in Phoronix Test Suite 4.4-Forsand and yesterday I noted many more new and updated benchmarks. Today there’s news to pass along in the Linux benchmarking world of updated WINE benchmarks courtesy of CodeWeavers.

Games

I enjoy running my Desktop under Linux. And while I am a long-term KDE supporter, my desktop diverges from the standard KDE setup quite drastically: There are no “Activities”, no noticeable Plasmoids and nothing on the desktop except one folder view. This flexibility is exactly Linux greatest strength, but the average users neither needs nor want this. Wikipedia claims 1.19% desktop market share – a stagnation at best. I do not want it to go down. So who will give Linux Desktop a new push?

After breaking all expectations and blasting past its $950,000 pledging goal raising over $8.5 million, the first crop of games for the Ouya have been revealed, from this month’s 10-day online Ouya “game jam”.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Sebastian wrote a pair of blog entries in the last week about where we are heading with Plasma in the near future. The first was an overview of the pathway to Frameworks 5 and what we’re provisionally referring to as Plasma Workspaces 2. The second entry covered his work on making it possible to write widget layouts (aka Containments) in QML.

Kdenlive, an advanced video editor for the KDE desktop has been updated to a new version. This version fixes bugs which made the software to crash, so all users are highly advised to install this release as soon as possible. Some other new features of this release has been summarized below:

The DVD Wizard was mostly rewritten, now allowing 16:9 menus. It now also autodetects the format of your videos and proposes a trandcoding if it is necessary. In fact, you can now drop any video in the Wizard and just click transcode to get it in the correct DVD format.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

From Internet Explorer (IE) to Firefox to Google Chrome, there’s no shortage of Web browsers to choose from these days–a luxury that can be easy to take for granted for those who have forgotten what things were a number of years ago, after Netscape collapsed and IE was the only game in town. But GNOME, the open source development community, thinks it can offer a better browser than these bigger-name alternatives in the form of Web, formerly known as Epiphany. Is it right?

GNOME 3: A desktop that brings a certain level of ire to the hearts and minds of many a Linux user. When this desktop first arrived, my opinion was fairly high. Why? It was new, fresh, and seemed like it could easily take the desktop world by storm. But then the developers stopped listening to the users and things seemed to fall apart.

December 2012 saw the final release of Slax 7.0 after more than three years without an update, quickly followed by several bug-fix point releases. In 7.0.3 the ability to act as PXE server was re-introduced, which had been present in earlier versions but was missing from the early 7.0 branch. I tried it in VMware Player, VirtualBox, from Live CD as intended and installed to external USB connected to an Acer 5551 laptop with ATI graphics, 4 GB Ram and a Phenom II X3 processor.

New Releases

The system is built as all 2.x releases on Debian testing “Wheezy”.
All packages have been synchronized with Debian testing repositories of 23/01/2013.
It features customized ultra light and fast Openbox desktop.

The fact that Russia’s ROSA Labs once collaborated with Mandriva is evident in the company’s latest release, ROSA Desktop 2012. Nevertheless, since breaking from Mandriva, ROSA Labs has forked the distro onto its own unique development path. ROSA Desktop 2012 is an LSB-compliant distro that features a customized KDE desktop. The free edition sports only free software; the Extended Edition includes nonfree components and proprietary software, such as codecs. ROSA Labs says that by developing ROSA Desktop 2012 with its own software development and build environment—ROSA ABF—the company is able to achieve unmatched technological independence, high quality and up to five years of technical support. Examples of new features include EFI/UEFI support, improved hardware detection and improved compatibility with Windows 8. Supported languages include English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

And Mandriva, or OpenMandriva, or MoonDrake (or any other name that they end up calling it) is also in my list of awaited releases. Yes, I know many people think that the Mandriva ship has sunk. The fact is, OpenMandriva.org is buzzing with mail list activity underneath the Web site posts.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

Most Linux distributions have switched over to using LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

Debian Family

A new distribution popped up on my radar last month when it was added to the Distrowatch.com database. It probably helped that its newest release was codenamed “GameOver” and featured lots and lots of games. Yesterday its team released 2.1 “Eris” Ultra.

In February of last year, Mozilla announced that it was moving to a rapid release cycle for new versions of the Firefox browser. That has turned out to work well for some users, but others have complaints, as you can see from comments at the bottom of this post. Among those who have complained about newer versions of Firefox, problems with extensions have loomed large. Some extensions simply cause performance drag, and some are actually built as malware and can even cause problems when users visit an infected website.

Mozilla has been steadily overhauling its process of handling extensions in Firefox. And now, in the company’s most two-fisted move yet, Mozilla is radically changing the way Firefox loads third party plug-ins such as Flash, Java and Silverlight. Here’s how.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

People at Ubuntu are making sure that the Raring Ringtail release is one the best Ubuntu releases till date. One of the most important things that they heve been working on is the dash, which is one of the most powerful tools in the Ubuntu desktop.

Google does a lot of good things for the society, the company has given a grant to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to give 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model B for schoolkids around the UK. The grant was made by Google Giving, the philanthropist arm of the company.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt was visiting Cambridge where he spent time teaching school kids along with Raspberry Pi’s Eben.

Jeff Hoogland, the chief developer and architect behind Bodhi Linux has been successful in porting Bodhi Linux to run on ARM based Android Mini PC MK802. The images are now public and you can download them from this web page.

Sprint today announced the next Android smartphone to offer 4G LTE service on the Now Network, introducing the rugged and waterproof Kyocera Torque. Pricing and exact availability is still unknown however the carrier expects it to show up in the “coming weeks”.

Android

One of the really neat features of coding for a portable platform like a phone is that you can use its motion sensors to control the UI. How useful this is in a particular app varies from “neat gimmick” to “UI perfection” — admittedly the example here is more on the “gimmick” end of the spectrum, but it’ll get you started with using the Android motion sensors. We’ll carry on using the code from the previous three tutorials, but this time, we’re going to add a detector which enables you to start the timer by shaking the phone.

ZTE’s Blade series of Android smartphones is quite successful, as it’s offering decent performance at an affordable price. The Chinese company has sold millions of Blade handsets around the world since the first model was launched (back in late 2010).

According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) service, global smartphone shipments grew 38 percent annually to reach 217 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012. Android and Apple iOS together accounted for a record 92 percent share of all smartphones shipped worldwide.<

Face it, you don’t want to pay for a tethering app and you’re not in a hurry to add another $10 a month to your data plan. Many of you don’t even want to bother with “rooting” a phone. Why bother spending extra money for a tablet that only needs a data connection every once in a while?

The Android back-end for Wayland’s Weston compositor is being dropped thereby losing support for Google’s mobile operating system on Wayland.

Going back several months there was active support for Google’s Android on Wayland. A Collabora employee created a Weston back-end for Android, which after weeks of work, was running on a Google Nexus phone.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

The U.S. is dominating the Android tablet race, and consumers here seem particularly enamored with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Approximately 59 percent of the Android tablets equipped with Localytics-integrated apps are from the U.S. About 5 percent of Android tablets were based in Great Britain, while Korea and Spain had 2 percent of the market each. Localytics assigned the additional 31 percent to the “other” category.

Google is set to announce its second-generation Nexus 7 tablet in May with the cooperation of Asustek Computer. The combined shipments of the company’s first- and second-generation Nexus 7s are expected to reach 10 million units in 2013, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Huawei may have its 6.1-inch Ascend Mate for the convenience of hiding your face, but ZTE’s also prepping its very own tabletphone to go head to head with its main rival. Dubbed the Grand Memo (V9815), this 5.7-inch 720p device made a surprise appearance at a ZTE event in Hong Kong today, and we got to snap some photos of it. The device looks identical to the P945 leaked earlier this month but packs some slightly different specs: 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro (same as the more premium Grand S), 13-megapixel camera, 8mm-thick body and Android 4.1.2.

I’ve worked out why Microsoft made Windows 8. Well, one of the reasons anyway. Aside from the fact that it’s got designs on the tablet and mobile market, and that it’s gleefully chasing the tail of wherever Apple chooses to lead, the introduction of Windows 8 already seems to be having some of a side effect: it’s making Windows 7 more popular.

I’m not going to be the first to notice that the new interface that Microsoft has introduced for Windows 8 has little place on a desktop PC. Clearly designed for a touch-screen device, its pride of place in a desktop environment is a real oddity. Likewise, the two tiers of applications. What the desktop PC has been crying out for, after all, has been ‘apps’ rather than programs. Smaller pieces of code, basically, with price tags that you apparently barely notice.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

So you think you’re a big-time hacker, huh? Well, Google is inviting you to show up at the CanSecWest security conference on March 7 in Vancouver, Canada, to see if you can crack your way into Chrome OS. And, to make it worth your time, Google is offering a pi worth of cash rewards. That’s a total prize package of $3.14159 million. I thought that would get your attention.

“You are not going to get malware on a Chrome OS. You are not going to get security problems on a Chrome OS that has the developer’s switch,” said Google’s Chris DiBona. “But at the same time, if you are a developer, that sort of locking down stops you from innovating. It stops you from developing very quickly. So we wanted to make it possible to have the best of both worlds there.”

Business

It should not surprise you that year after year the most common resolution people make is a combination of lose weight, eat healthier, and get in better shape. This, along with my own resolutions, prompted me to think about what it means to get a company in open source shape.

There are many parallels to a person getting themselves in better physical shape and getting their company in a better position to use open source. Let’s take a look at a few of these ways while pulling lessons from exercise and athletic training that can be applied to any enterprise.

BSD

Earlier this week I wrote about Arch BSD: a new operating system that is based upon Arch Linux but in place of the Linux kernel is FreeBSD’s kernel. To talk about today is Starch Linux, a distribution also derived from Arch but its approach is the opposite. Starch Linux still runs off Arch’s Linux kernel but it has an OpenBSD user-space.

Licensing

With the release of LGPL licensed C and Java connectors for MariaDB and MySQL in November 2012, a number of questions were raised in the community over the drivers’ provenance and appropriateness of the LGPL licence. The H went looking for answers…

Open Hardware

Before the Open Compute Summit in the Silicon Valley earlier this month, the world thought it was still more than a year away from seeing 64-bit ARM servers. A Sunnyvale, California, chipmaker changed that perception at the Facebook-led open-source-hardware conference.

Programming

Computer programming can be a fun hobby, as I learned when I programmed Apple II computers last century. Back then, I’d lie on my bed and dream up some educational game, then run over to my Apple //c to bring the game to life. Sometimes in less than two hours I could go from raw idea to working prototype. The most fun part was sharing the programs I created with friends and having them suggest improvements.

In the wake of Google’s CEO Schmidt going to North Korea on an official visit, American media has been abuzz with stories. Yesterday, CNN carried a story about how Google Maps is expanding in North Korea thanks to “a community of citizen cartographers” (that is Google’s claim) allowing it work “in a similar way to Wikipedia, allowing users to add, edit and review information” (that is CNN’s take on it).

Security

The developers of the VLC video player have warned of a crashing bug in the latest 2.0.5 version of the application, which might be exploited to execute arbitrary code. The issue is a problem in the ASF demuxer (libasf_plugin.*), which can be tricked into overflowing a buffer with a specially crafted ASF movie. The developers note that users would have to open that specially crafted file to be vulnerable and advise users to not open files from untrusted third parties or untrusted sites.

There’s a war going on, and it’s raging here at home — not in the streets or the fields, but on the Internet. You can think of it as a war on the digital homeland. If you work for a power company, bank, defense contractor, transportation provider, or other critical infrastructure type of operation, your organization might be in the direct line of fire. And everyone can become collateral damage.

Launching “Operation Last Resort,” Anonymous twice hacked the Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission this weekend to protest the death of Aaron Swartz and a legal system “wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control (and) power.” The group threatened to release Justice Department data if the government fails to reform flawed cyber crime laws that allow almost unfettered prosecutorial power, and then turned the website into a videogame and Guy Fawkes mask proclaiming, “We do not forgive. We do not forget.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

The centuries-long dispute over whether and how much the United States should intervene in world affairs may at last be headed toward a resolution. A prominent early view, held by many of the founding fathers and aptly summarized by John Quincy Adams, enjoined Americans not to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, had detailed, contemporaneous knowledge of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on captured terrorism suspects during an earlier stint as a top spy agency official, according to multiple sources familiar with official records.

In the fight against terrorism, the American military’s escalating drone program has become the face of our foreign policy in Pakistan, Yemen and parts of Africa. And while the use of un-manned drones indeed protects American soldiers, the growing number of casualties — which include civilians as well as suspected terrorists — has prompted a United Nations investigation into both the legality and the deadly toll of these strikes.

But the technology for drones — or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — is rapidly being reformulated and repackaged for domestic use, spurring debate over the significant potential benefits on the home front versus grave concerns for personal privacy.

The Oscars will likely go for a Middle East story that ends on a definitively happy note. With Americans and their collaborators (the short-changed Canadians) looking like heroes, including two Hollywood film producers. It’s the stuff of Oscar dreams. As is, potentially, the well-acted romantic comedy with some “difficult” subject matter that’s handled frankly enough to earn potential Best Picture status, but also cavalierly enough to actually win. (No one really wants to talk about bipolar disorder that can’t be cured with dance competitions.) But that terrorism drama that shows Americans at their worst (and best, in some respects) and ends with a big shadowy sigh? Yeah, maybe we were crazy to think that ever had a chance.

Ben Emmerson wants to be clear: He’s not out to ban flying killer robots used by the CIA or the U.S. military. But the 49-year-old British lawyer is about to become the bane of the drones’ existence, thanks to the United Nations inquiry he launched last week into their deadly operations.

On Wednesday, the government announced that the economy had shrunk at a 0.1 percent annual pace between October and December. That came as a surprise to most economists, who were expecting at least modest growth. So what happened?

Although our own coverage of this week’s pre-trial proceedings in the 9/11 military commission trial at Guantánamo already covered the issue in some detail, I couldn’t help but be taken by Amy Davidson’s post on the New Yorker‘s Daily Comment blog on “Red-Light-Gate”–the question of who, other than the presiding judge, has the ability to immediately censor statements made on the record at the 9/11 pre-trial hearings, and what that question says more generally about the specter (if not the reality) of these hearings.

The military judge presiding over the trial of the five men accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks declined Tuesday to explain a mysterious episode in which the audio and video feeds of the proceedings were severed.

The feeds to the public gallery and media centers were stopped for a few minutes during pretrial arguments Monday at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, apparently startling the judge, Army Col. James Pohl.

Cablegate

The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.

[...]

Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.

It’s just been announced that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will run for a seat in the Australian Senate during this year’s elections. He is currently avoiding arrest by living in the Ecuadorian Embassy and a little while ago I photographed a note held by a police officer detailing the lengths they would go to in order to arrest him. Including what to do if he came out ‘in a diplomatic bag’… This photograph made news around the world because it appeared to show police would ignore any laws governing diplomatic immunity. What it didn’t do was shed any more light on the conditions inside the Embassy for Assange himself.

A “Salute to Bradley Manning,” the Army Pfc. accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, will be held in Berkeley Thursday with Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg and Kevin Gosztola, co-author of a book on the Manning case.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will run for a seat in the Australian Senate during this year’s elections, his organisation announced Wednesday, with his mother saying he would be “awesome” in the role.

Long the disclaimer of those bearing bad news, the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” may soon become a rallying cry of the American public.

Under an ostensibly liberal, Democratic president, government prosecutors have ushered in a new era of targeting whistleblowers. Prosecuting those responsible for the wrongdoings, meanwhile, has been made no such priority. The recent sentencing of former CIA officer John Kiriakou represents the latest example in the crackdown on leaks to the media and public.

Last month, on December 13th, 2012, I visited Julian Assange, Australian founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, in the Ecuadorian embassy, in Knightsbridge, London.

It’s been seven months now since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy and was given political asylum.

He entered the embassy after the British Courts shamefully refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning about sexual molestation (no criminal charges have been made against him). Julian Assange has said he is willing to answer questions in the U.K. relating to accusations against him, or alternatively, to go to Sweden, provided that the Swedish government guarantee he will not be extradited to the U.S. where plans are being made to try him for conspiracy to commit espionage. The Swedish Government refuses to give such assurances.

[....]

Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book,

After Julian Assange gave a speech at the Oxford Union on January 23, 2012, The Guardian published an article criticizing his appearance, saying “he refused to be gracious”. At the time, video had not been uploaded of the event, so it was impossible to contradict The Guardian’s claims. Now that the Oxford Union has uploaded the full speech and Q&A session (albeit only after editing out footage of “Collateral Murder” due to copyright fears), The Guardian’s blatant smear tactics can be revealed.

But more than ASIO has changed. Between Murphy’s raids on ASIO in search of information about Croatian terrorism he believed the agency was hiding from him, and Robert McClelland expanding ASIO’s powers via the “WikiLeaks amendment”, something has changed in Labor’s relationship with the national security apparatus of the country.

How great is that to be an agency that can just twiddle a few bits in its computer system whenever it needs to cover its budget? Sure, you knew already that the Fed could print money, but this makes it all a little bit more concrete, doesn’t it?

When the latest New York magazine cover story on leading New York City mayoral candidate Christine Quinn came out this week, it quoted current Mayor Michael Bloomberg as telling a reporter to “look at the ass on her” while gesturing toward a woman at a holiday party.

Statistics Iceland reports that the last quarter of 2012 showed a total natoinal unemployment rate of 4.6%. In exact numbers, this means a decline in the number of people without work but seeking employment from 10,600 in the last quarter of 2011 to 8,400 today.

As leaders from the world’s top banks and corporations continue to meet this week at the World Economic Forum, protesters also gathered in Davos to announce this year’s Public Eye “Shame Awards.” And the winners are…Goldman Sachs and Shell.

Every morning, from his desk by the bathroom at the far end of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s trading floor overlooking London’s Liverpool Street station, Paul White punched a series of numbers into his computer.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

In a futile bid to preempt the allegation that automatically follows an article of this nature, I begin with a clarification. It is lifted from the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where a man in a cinema queue berates Larry David as “a self-hating Jew” for whistling an aria from Wagner. I certainly do hate myself, is Larry’s reply, but it has absolutely nothing to do with being a Jew.

There was a time when a writer could address the spirited disputes sparked by World Holocaust Day in a tone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause without feeling the need to absolve himself of any form of anti-Semitism, though it feels like a distant age now. It is more than 10 years since the Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman, for decades as passionate a friend of Israel as parliament knew, was jostled at St John’s Wood synagogue, on Yom Kippur, by congregants enraged by his criticisms of Ariel Sharon.

Bill Gates has spent $50 million for a three year project known as the MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) project. They just concluded the study and released a final report which can be found here. In the final report they conclude that teacher evaluations have an ideal weighting of 33% value-added, 33% principal observations, and 33% student surveys. They justify the 33% value-added because they have analyzed the data and found, contrary to everyone else’s analysis of similar data, that teachers DO have similar value-added scores from one year to the next. To prove their point, they print on page 8 this very compelling set of graphs.

[...]

As even a ‘paint ball’ produces such a nice line when subjected to the principle of averaging, we can safely assume that the Gates data, if we were to see it in its un-averaged form would be just as volatile as my first graph.

It seems like the point of this ‘research’ is to simply ‘prove’ that Gates was right about what he expected to be true. He hired some pretty famous economists, people who certainly know enough about math to know that their conclusions are invalid.

Privacy

oday is Data Privacy Day in the United States and Canada. To mark the occasion, Twitter has launched a new transparency-focused website to tell users about how governments are snooping on them.
Twitter’s latest figures show government data requests increased in the second part of 2012, in keeping with a trend reported last week by Google. The popular social networking site says it received 1,009 requests for user data between July and December 2012, up 18.8 percent from the first part of the year. Of the total 1,858 requests made over the full 12-month period, 80 percent came from authorities in the United States. (This presumably reflects the fact that the United States has more Twitter users than any other country, by quite a significant margin.)

On the occasion of Data Privacy Day, Twitter has released its second biannual Transparency Report and — what do you know? — Twitter is still giving away more user information requested by the U.S. government than ever, and without a warrant. It’s the continuation of a frightening trend that’s as frightening as it is growing; as the likes of Google and Twitter tell us more about how we’re being spied on, we’re still not sure how much of our data the government’s actually getting back.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has branded the Australian government’s data retention proposals as “fraught with massive danger,” and containing the possibility to hold every Australian to ransom if data logs are stolen.

All personal information stored by British internet users on major “cloud” computing services including Google Drive can be spied upon routinely without their knowledge by US authorities under newly-approved legislation, it can be disclosed.

I think most people read about the “Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy Award” via a blog post from the Mozilla Foundation, publisher of the Firefox Web browser. The title of the blog post is “Mozilla Recognized as Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy.”

It’s important to note that the keyword term here is “Internet Company,” because the study is published as the “Most Trusted Company for Privacy Award.” The company that took home the overall honor is American Express. Mozilla ranked 20 overall, but ranked at the top of the Internet & Social Media subgroup.

The thing that caught my attention as I read the report (pdf), is that Verizon and Microsoft also made the Top 20. Verizon was actually number 1 in the Communications subgroup. I think that’s interesting because a key finding of the study revealed that “the number one privacy-related concern expressed by 61 percent of respondents is identity, closely followed by an increase in government surveillance (56 percent).”

The founder of the world wide web has sounded a warning about the dangers posed by governments intent on increasing the level of monitoring and filtering of the online activity of its citizens.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said that while it was important to fight serious organised crime and for a state to defend itself against cyber attack, there were enormous negatives associated with excessive government oversight of the internet…

Civil Rights

In a landmark ruling, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the law which requires people to disclose all previous convictions to certain employers is a breach of human rights.

In this case, a 21 year old man wanted cautions to be removed from his criminal record. His crime, being accused of stealing two bicycles at aged 11. Information about the cautions had been flagged up when applying for a part-time job at a local football club at the age of 17 and later when he applied for a university course in sports studies.

Nearly two years ago, we wrote about how Aaron Tobey was suing the US government after he was detained by the TSA for trying to go through airport security without his shirt on, but with a paraphrased version of the 4th Amendment on his chest:

When the global financial system crumbled over four years ago, Iceland played host to one of the most dramatic economic collapses in modern history. Its three largest banks were unable to refinance debt roughly ten times the size of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), causing one of the world’s wealthiest nations to limp with hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The island became a symbol for capitalism’s systemic failure.

They particularly don’t do so when they believe that the court decision that would push them in that direction was wrong—and that an appeal to a higher authority and the resulting ability to clarify the law in a positive direction is available to them. What Martins, according to Charlie’s own reporting, was asking for here, in other words, would have been a dramatic step. I think it would have been the right step, for reasons Bobby and I explained in the post linked to above, but nobody should be too surprised when the Justice Department errs on the side of defending a completed conviction.

Intellectual Monopolies

Every time we think Prenda Law can’t get in any more hot water, the firm behind dozens of mass copyright lawsuits proves us wrong. In recent months we’ve written about a Florida judge blasting Prenda for “attempted fraud on the court.” We’ve covered a Minnesota man’s charge that Prenda named him the head of one of its shell companies without his knowledge or permission. And we’ve covered Prenda’s efforts to avoid answering questions about these allegations by claiming that California defense lawyer Morgan Pietz invented his “John Doe” client. Prenda also unsuccessfully sought the dismissal of a California judge who started asking questions about Prenda’s alleged misconduct.

Copyrights

Who is the mysterious millionaire, who left school at age 15, who is now listed as the new CEO of Kim Dotcom’s latest venture? Geraldine Johns gets a glimpse into the world of the elusive Tony Lentino.

We’ve covered the Stephanie Lenz / dancing baby / fair use case for years — but now it looks like there’s finally going to be a trial to consider if Universal Music can be punished for sending a DMCA takedown notice on a video of Lenz’s infant son dancing to 29 seconds of a song by Prince, which Lenz asserts was clearly fair use. If you haven’t followed the case, it’s been argued back and forth for years. At one point, the court ruled that a copyright holder does need to take fair use into account before sending a DMCA takedown, but that there needs to be “subjective bad faith” by Universal Music in sending the takedown. In other words, Lenz (and the EFF, who is representing her) needs to show, effectively, that Universal knew that it was sending bogus takedowns. The EFF has argued that willful blindness by Universal meant that it had knowledge (amusingly, using precedents in copyright cases in the other direction, where copyright holders argue that willful blindness can be infringement).

The Justice Department’s legal assault on Swartz is of a vindictive piece with the prosecution of others who have carried important information into the public realm. Front and center is 25-year-old Bradley Manning, the Iraq War enlistee accused of being WikiLeaks’s source in the military. The restricted foreign policy documents that Manning allegedly released don’t amount to even 1 percent of the 92 million items the government classified last year, but the young private faces life in prison at his court-martial in June for the charge, among twenty-one others, of “aiding the enemy.” Then there’s Jeremy Hammond, age 28, who in his freshman year at the University of Illinois hacked the computer science department’s home page, then told them how they could fix its problem. He got thrown out of school for that; now he’s in a federal prison facing thirty-nine years to life, charged with various hacks and leaks (all apparently led by an FBI informant) including the 5 million internal e-mails of Stratfor, a private security firm hired by corporations to surveil private citizens, among other activities.

We recently wrote about how Kim Dotcom has retained famed human rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam to explore whether or not there’s a human rights angle to his case, specifically alleging “contract prosecution” by the entertainment industry. I’m still somewhat skeptical that such an argument could go anywhere, but Amsterdam himself has put up a rather detailed blog post, explaining why he’s taking the case, which may seem quite different than his usual fare: taking on corruption and human rights violations in far flung parts of the world, including Africa and Latin America. After highlighting the many problems with the case (and the continued failures in court to date), as well as the close ties prosecutor Neil MacBride has with big copyright holders, he points out that he sees some serious similarities to what’s happening here with the kind of corruption he’s witnessed in third world nations.

My first quality time with Aaron Swartz was at the last Comdex, in the Fall of 2002. He had just turned 16, but looked about 10. His old Mac laptop featured a screen with no working backlight. Only he could read it, which he rationalized, with a smile, as a “security precaution.” When I asked him about school, he said he had moved on. He was still learning all kinds of stuff, but he didn’t need school for that. And hey, there was work to be done, and he was too busy with that.

Now we present part two: suggestions to address the CFAA’s penalty structure. The CFAA, which is the primary federal computer crime law, allows for harsh punishments and makes too many offenses felonies. The statute is also structured so that the same behavior can violate multiple provisions of the law, which prosecutors often combine to beef up the potential penalties.

The lawyers for disgraced former Probation commissioner John O’Brien blasted prosecutors in a filing yesterday, calling their decision to charge O’Brien and two of his top deputies as if they were greedy mobsters “breathtaking” while accusing them of not turning over key evidence.

The attorneys, writing in a 29-page motion requesting documents from the US Attorney’s office, said their clients are confident they will beat the accusations they created a “rigged” hiring system catering to the requests of state lawmakers and others.

When a law professor is given a “chair” s/he gives a lecture in honor of the honor. I am the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership. On February 19, at 5pm @ HLS, I was scheduled to give my chair lecture. After Aaron’s death, I asked the Dean to let me reschedule the lecture. But after some more thought, I’ve decided to make the lecture about Aaron, and about how we need to honor his work. Anyone is invited. More details to follow. And the event will be webcast.

Rarely does the name of one person, lacking political office or seat of power, echo across the internet so thoroughly as it did in the wake of Aaron Swartz’s death. How was the work of one person revered by so many, from the front page of every major paper in the US, to radical communities working against various axis of oppression?